Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday August 16, 2010 @09:00AM
from the and-the-internet-has-never-been-the-same dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Software giant Microsoft's Internet Explorer turned 15 years old on Monday. The company recently said it would launch the Internet Explorer 9 public beta version on September 15, 2010. The software giant launched the first version of the browser, Internet Explorer 1, on August 16, 1995. It was a revised version of Spyglass Mosaic, which Microsoft had licensed from Spyglass Inc."

Windows XP is coming up to a decade old itself - its been replaced twice over, there is no commercial reason why Microsoft should continue to support it with new features.

Perhaps not, but most people are still using XP, hardly anybody has moved to Vista or Windows 7. Not having new versions of IE isn't going to stop people from using XP, they'll just use FIrefox or IE6 instead.

The only reason I bought Windows 7 Pro 64-bit was to feed my gaming addiction with support over 4GB of RAM and presumably being the next majorly supported platform. It was the least amount I could give to Microsoft to legally continue my habit (the XBox is over twice as much, and they get licensing fees, etc.) I only use it for a game PC and all the rest of my life is in Debian. I wish they'd sell a Windows, Gamer Edition that doesn't have the movie maker and all the other crap I'll never use. I'm still

It was included in my Professional edition... either via the disk or a covert update (because I didn't see anything about the DVD maker in the update summaries.)

Which brings me to another issue I have with Win7... I removed the Libraries and Favorites links from Explorer and they keep pushing them back in during updates. I wish there was a layer of user settings that even Microsoft has to abide by.

Actually, under 64-bit Windows, 32-bit processes get a full 4GB of address space. Devices and kernel-mode drivers use addresses > 4GB. That's a nice benefit of 64-bit Windows even if most of your apps are still 32-bit.

IE8 works fine on XP. Why would people continue to use IE6? In fact, the last time I used Windows, I had to admit that IE8 was almost a decent browser. It has tabs, and all sorts of things that all the other browsers have had forever. In fact, IE7 isn't terrible.

To be perfectly honest, I HATE IE, but I don't let my personal preferences blind me to the fact that IE has been improving for about - oh - is it three years now?

In a large number of cases, because its a corporate machine where the corporation has a critical webapp that breaks when you try to run it on anything other than IE6. There's a LOT corporations out there like that.

In a large number of cases, because its a corporate machine where the corporation has a critical webapp that breaks when you try to run it on anything other than IE6. There's a LOT corporations out there like that.

Yup; however, IE8 gives you "compatibility mode" for that. So basically you can run the IE6 web apps that no one wants to replace in what amounts to IE6 and use something more modern for everything else.

Of course, I've already worked at one company since where their web devs were using that as a

I don't know where you get your statistics from, but a quick google search of 'OS Statistics' yields this page: clicky [w3schools.com]
Please explain what you consider 'hardly anybody'. Because I consider 31.5% (win7 + vista) of all computers on the web a significant portion.

Hardly anyone has upgraded? I don't even think I know anybody personally that hasn't upgraded from XP to Vista or 7 by now. Even the entire IT department at work is now running on 7 and all the servers are running Server 08 R2. Also, the college I graduated from last Spring is imaging all the mandatory leased student laptops with Windows 7 this year by default.

The problem is that with the advent of netbooks (and now tablets?) its less about having a lot of power, and a lot about portability. So for many people its more worth it to use the 'more lightweight' XP instead of Windows 7. Speaking about myself, I dual boot XP with Ubuntu - I have a copy of Windows 7 but I am not even considering installing it.

So I think by moving off XP and attempting to extinguish it - microsoft is losing on the 'netbook' market.

Here's my take on the whole netbook spec creep question. The original vision of what a netbook was was a miniature laptop that had just enough capability to get you on the web and do a few other basic things. They were small, light and very portable compared to regular laptops. Continuing that vision today would involve not adding bulk, size, and consequently price but by actually reducing those things. Instead of an "an Atom 330 with nVidia's ION", how about a Snapdragon and a PowerVR? No active cooli

It does not matter when the first copy of XP was sold, it matters when the last copy was sold. You cannot drop support for something that you sold a few months ago just because it has been on sale for 8 years and there are two newer versions.

But they aren't dropping support - they aren't releasing new apps for it, but that is *not* the same as dropping support. If you buy a new car today that was first released as a model 5 years ago, are you entitled to have access to the features Ford has on newer models? No, you have the option of buying a new model and not the dated model.

It's called listening to your customers and not dictating to them what they want. Now I don't use it, but XP is still widely used, because it got "good enough" for companies and individuals to use and rely on. Same with upgrading hardware. If what you have is good enough, not broken, and does the job, there is no overwhelming need to upgrade, even if the hardware guys want you to.

Comes a time that corporations and stockholders, etc should put the fork down, push back from the table, and realize they have ea

And, did you notice that ext4 wont work with old Linux kernels either? It's like Linus isn't even trying either. [/sarcasm]

Get over yourself. XP was a great system, and it ran a long long race. It's time to lay it aside now. Upgrade to Ubuntu or something. If you're still in love with Bill Gate's version of bling, upgrade to Win7. It's a decent operating system, after all.

I don't have any major problems with Windows 7, well other than the UI changes from XP, but I also see no point in formatting a drive with a working OS on it that is still good enough for me and installing a different OS, and then reinstalling all of my programs, some of which may not work with the new OS. And all of that for what? Pretty graphics (Aero) that will be turned off right after Autorun?

Fair enough - if your OS works, don't upgrade. But, I'm a masochist, I guess. I upgrade and downgrade all the time. Or, maybe I'm just 'tarded, and I enjoy watching the progress counters telling me how soon my new (or old) OS will be ready to run.;^)

I used to be like that some time ago. Then I started reinstalling Windows only if I absolutely could not get the old installation to work, because reinstalling all of the programs takes a long time and makes the PC semi-unusable (oh, I know, I'll just use program X here, wait, last time I used it was a year ago, before the reinstall, now where is that setup file...).

I can play with different OSs on virtual machines and an unused PC that I have (now it has Windows 98 installed, because I wanted to play Syste

Shame that Opera sees such little take-up. It has 99% of the functionality of the common addons for Firefox already built-in (and has for years), it is a damn sight faster on low-end machines than Firefox, it's cross-platform, it's got a built-in mail client that is more than good enough for the average joe (with super-fast searching for EVERYTHING), and it's normally first with any innovation (WebM, Acid-compliance, HTML5, etc.) - hell, for the last

Er... yeah, if you leave the default memory cache enabled - Opera does its own in-memory caching where some other browsers rely on the underlying filesystem to cache for them, and Opera loads QT which counts as "memory used" on Windows but not under the vast amount of Linux distros that already have it in memory to be shared. There are a million and one ways to tweak Opera, which is another plus for it, including disabling quite a lot of functionality that you wouldn't want active on low-memory machines.

Actually, the first public beta of Safari was January 7th 2003 according to Wikipedia. The first public point release of Firefox (or rather, Phoenix as it was called at the time before the great renaming controversy) was Phoenix 0.1 which was released in September 2002. So Firefox/Phoenix preceded Safari by about 3-4 months.

Firefox came out with many very usable, relatively stable point releases that I was using as my regular web browser long before it was at 1.0 (it is certainly true that Safari 1.0 prec

Point releases? I'm slightly baffled. I joined the Firefox club around milestone.5 or so, and I was on the edge of my seat waiting for each new milestone. Did I simply allow some of the jargon to fly over my head?

If M$ executives and employees would have ditched MSIE if security or performance were an issue. Opera [opera.com] and even Safari [apple.com] are far and above superior, if closed source is an obligation. Keeping MSIE in place AND keeping pieces of it throughout the

Despite your countless security holes, bad implementations of web standards and all these bad browser-dependent HTML codes caused by you, you really gave all these laymen in the world a simple way to explore the Internet. And glad to see that you're improving.

Despite your countless security holes, bad implementations of web standards and all these bad browser-dependent HTML codes caused by you, you really gave all these laymen in the world a simple way to explore the Internet. And glad to see that you're improving...

A startup that I worked for hired a new CFO, apparently based on the fact that he had been CFO of Spyglass. Apparently, noone had heard this story yet....

At one point, just before we went under, he was being paid some ludicrous amount of money to drive his company car to CostCo to pick up cases of soda for our "free soda" fridge, as a cost-cutting measure.

Hehe, yup. Netscape 4 is FAR, FAR worse than IE 4 on its worst day. I still remember it and honestly I was more glad of its demise from the support list than I will be of IE 6's. IE 6 isn't a bad browser in and of itself, it just was allowed to stay around too long as Microsoft rested on their laurels. If IE 7 had come out in 2003 or 2004 no one would be complaining about IE in general or IE 6 in particular.

The problem with IE6 is not that it was bad but that people wrote ActiveX applications for it and those applications are still needed.

The problem now is that many organizations have clueless IT departments that do not know how to deploy those old applications via Terminal Services and instead insist that desktop machines stick with IE6.

Anyone who wonders why IE 6 became the de facto standard just needs to find a download of Netscape Communicator.

I don't get it. IE became the defacto standard because it was pre-installed on MS Windows. And MS Windows became the defactor standard because it comes with every computer pre-installed.

If, back then, the Netscape Communicator were pre-installed, the Netscape Communicator would have been the defacto standard. But Netscape didn't own an operation system. Yes, it's nice to have an operation system which with you can bundle stuff. It's good that besides ActiveX MS didn't really done anything with the IE. At least we are not living like in South Korea where you need to have IE with ActiveX to do any online banking.

What exactly did MS anyway with the 90% market share of IE? I can't remember any technology that was really needed back then. I think they were just happy to have the market share. Right now I can't see anything that the dominance of IE have left us.

I don't get it. IE became the defacto standard because it was pre-installed on MS Windows. And MS Windows became the defactor standard because it comes with every computer pre-installed.

Ah no:

1) Netscape came pre-installed by some (most?) OEMs at that time. I don't have numbers on this but it was hard to find a computer that didn't have it.

2) Netscape was out first; a lot of people were settled into using Netscape before there even really was an IE. Netscape started with the dominant market position.

3) While Netscape for a while was superior, later versions of Netscape were terrible -- as in, not as good as the previous versions of Netscape. Eventually even people who hated IE of that era (including me) started using it just because they were so damn tired of how buggy Netscape had become.

I don't deny that Microsoft had a big and unfairly used advantage in having the dominant operating system, but in the grand scheme of things, that amounts to Microsoft trying to slip Netscape roofies while Netscape was busy firing a shotgun at itself as fast as it could.

This poor company did an almost supernatural amount of damage to its reputation through their "testing" methodology:

1) when the programmers are about halfway done, release the software on the web without any testing.2) when the programmers say they are done, release the software on the web without any testing.3) repeat six or seven times.4) call one of those versions the "final vers

And try to get more than 5 minutes before "Netscape. This program performed an illegal operation and will be shut down"

IE crashed maybe a tenth as much. And most of the time you could move the illegal operation error to the side and keep going. All browsers are rock solid today in comparison. Of course the fact that that was back in the Win9X days didn't help anything.

yeah, pretty much. I think everyone who uses IE doesn't know they're using IE, and if they do, they probably don't care about how old it is. Everyone else doesn't use it. But think about it this way -- its not that IE is turning 15, its that the Browser Wars started about 15 years ago, and despite some lull in the middle, seem to be just as heated and relevant as ever.

The only thing that's really changed in 15 years is that Netscape faded into the shadows and went guerrilla as Mozilla, and Microsoft's at

Various revisions of CSS and Javascript, as well as HTML5 in the newest browsers.

Although I'm ambivalent about the whole 'browser as a surrogate OS' direction that we seem to be taking, there are a few web apps that I consider essential to my day-to-day use (Google maps is perhaps the best example). You just couldn't have achieved that kind of responsive interface with older tech.

I'm glad they didn't implement those form elements, because once they implement a part of a standard, their implementation becomes the rule. If they implemented HTML5 form elements now, that essentially means marking the current HTML5 draft as finalized. I don't think that would be good for HTML5.